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A blog post by Museum Educator (and former JMM intern) Marisa Shultz! To read more posts from Marisa, click here.

New Lesson Plan Available on the JMM’s Website!

I have exciting news to share with you! Now available on our website are the teaching materials and lesson plan for the “What Americans Knew About Kristallnacht” lesson debuted at the 2019 Winter Teachers Institute.

This picture depicts teachers collaborating on an activity at our 2019 Winter Teachers Institute. Our Winter and Summer Teachers Institutes provide educators with the tools to help their students understand the Holocaust.

This lesson plan, designed for high school students, charges students to become historians, analyzing primary sources with the goal of answering: How did contemporaneous American newspapers cover Kristallnacht and ultimately, what did Americans know about Kristallnacht? Included on our website is a detailed lesson plan with a variety of activities that challenge students to use their prior knowledge, critical thinking, and investigative skills while providing them the support to help them succeed. Additionally, the lesson plan includes variations on the activities so that teachers can adapt this lesson to meet their students’ needs. The lesson plan ultimately provides a concluding activity which encourages students to synthesize multiple sources with the goal of understanding what Americans knew about Kristallnacht.

Also included on our website is the corresponding student packet. This packet helps students learn how to approach a primary source by scaffolding their reading with guided questions. The questions progress from the factual, such as “Where was the article published?” through the more difficult questions such as “What is the author’s attitude toward the subject?” Students will feel more confident interpreting primary sources after working with this scaffolding!

Finally, we have also included on our website a packet of twelve different primary sources from both local Maryland sources and larger national newspapers. Each primary source, from The New York Times to the Baltimore Afro-American reported on Kristallnacht in a variety of ways, and students will have the opportunity to examine the differences between them.

This picture depicts headlines from many of the articles included in the primary source packet including “Nazi Reprisals Believed Doom of Jewish Life” from The Baltimore Sun, “Observer Describes Wrecking of Jewish Shops in Berlin: Outbreak Declared Worst Anti-Semitic Demonstration Ever Seen in Reich” from The Evening Star and “No Regret Voiced: Goebbels Declares that the Nation Followed Its ‘Healthy Instincts’” from The New York Times. With this lesson plan, students will have the opportunity to analyze these articles and more to try and answer the question: what did Americans know about Kristallnacht?

Not a teacher but interested in how Life Magazine, The Baltimore Sun, and The Baltimore Jewish Times reported on Kristallnacht? Check out that primary source packet for excerpts from a variety of newspapers on the Eastern seaboard.

A blog post by Director of Learning and Visitor Engagement Ilene Dackman-Alon. To read more posts by Ilene click HERE.

It’s hard to believe that 10 days ago, there was a shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history. As a response, millions of Jews worldwide along with people of all faiths pledged to #ShowUpForShabbat this past weekend in solidarity with Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, sending a resounding message that love triumphs over hate.

I have been touched by the interactions that I have had with many people over the past 10 days as a response to the tragic event. I have observed so many random acts of kindness. People have gone out of their ways to show support and to renounce hatred of any kind. I have received emails from non-Jewish colleagues expressing their support and concern. I have heard stories that synagogues in our community have received random bouquets of flowers with notes of support, care and prayers for the Jewish community.

On Halloween, we had 4th and 5th graders from the Peace Academy at the Oneness-Family School in Montgomery County visit the JMM. Some students even came dressed in the Halloween costumes! The students were studying Judaism and immigration history in school. Their visit included a tour of the historic synagogues and guided activities through the Voices of Lombard Street and the Houdini exhibits.

As the students got back on the bus, the teacher handed our volunteer docent, Lois Fekete, a handful of cards that the students had created in school. As adults, we sometimes forget about how events affect children.

I must say that I was blown away by these cards.

Once again, random acts of kindness- this time from the mouths of 10 and 11-year-olds.

This Wednesday, November 7th, our community will come together at Moses Montefiore Synagogue to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, also known as “The Night of Broken Glass.” On the evening of November 9, 1938, violent anti-Jewish demonstrations broke out across Germany, Austria, and areas of Czechoslovakia. Over the next two days, violent mobs provoked by antisemitic incitement by Nazi officials, destroyed hundreds of synagogues, and burned and desecrated thousands of Jewish religious artifacts.

The recent attack in Pittsburgh illustrates that anti-semitism and events such as Kristallnacht are not simply facts referred to in history books but are prevalent in our world today. It is the hope that this program will educate about the dangers of bigotry and open the hearts and minds of people. We need to continue to do random acts of kindness to our fellow man. By coming together as a community, we find comfort as we gather “to remember” and to “stand up” to ensure that antisemitism has no place in our world.

Ms. Conwill’s address was at the same time casual and compelling. She went off script long enough to joke with her audience about Black Panther and stayed on message consistently enough to deliver quotations verbatim. She invoked prophets—biblical and modern—from Isaiah to Martin Luther King Jr., Amos to Abraham Joshua Heschel. She recommended books and movies and articles. She shared successes of her museum.

But it was a phrase all her own that gave me pause. I jotted it down in my notebook: “acts of terror and fear connect Jews and Blacks in America.”

In a story to punctuate acts of terror and fear, she described the demoralizing experience of a noose being found in the galleries at the NMAAHC, in the same general time-period as the nation watched white supremacists in Charlottesville chant “Jews will not replace us” while marching with tiki torches.

As one, those assembled held our breath as we shook our heads in dismay. She told us about where and how the noose was found, and what the response was from her staff. And then she went on to relate the feeling of watching museum colleagues—from the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum, the Museum of National History, Air and Space, American History, National Gallery, and others, march up the National Mall to stand in solidarity with her and her colleagues.

She described the warmth of the day and the warmth of her heart knowing that museums exist, in part, to stand against the kind of cowardice that would leave a symbol of fear and violence in a public space. I could feel myself and my fellow audience members exhale our held breath. The reality of the noose was still with us, but our response, as museum professionals and as human beings, restored hope.

The story was real for me. It evoked strong emotion.

It was nothing compared to what I experienced the next day.

On Tuesday, I started my day at the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum.

On an abbreviated docent-led tour of the Museum, I was struck by the presentation of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were destroyed. The USHMM displays the remnants of a stained glass window from a synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht along with large scale before and after photos of the sanctuary.* I was struck by the well of emotion the object invoked in me.

Later in the day, I attended Ms. Cornwill’s museum, the National Museum of African American Culture and History.

In the section about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, I made a point to look closely at the photos of the four girls who were lost, and then as I turned a corner, I was confronted once again by broken stained glass. The NMAAHC displays fragments of a window destroyed by the bomb that took those four children’s lives.**

Acts of terror and fear connect Jews and Blacks in America.

A small shudder ran up my spine. If Kinshasha Cornwill’s words gave me pause, these two stained glass windows, exhibited in museums on the same National Mall, made it real. In that shudder, I was reminded of the truth of the proposition of museums: things matter; experience is not the same as information.

In that shudder, I was strengthened in the hope and the conviction that museums can be a part of the change I want to see in the world.

More and more, our museum colleagues are realizing that though what we do is not partisan, it is political. Our visitors are not just learning information for their own use and edification. They are living experiences that, if we do it right, help them to become better human beings. With a nod to our colleagues at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, if we do it right, our visitors will not be bystanders but upstanders. I look forward to continuing to walk this path at JMM.

*From the USHMM: “The shattered stained glass windows of the Zerrennerstrasse synagogue after its destruction on Kristallnacht.” More info here.

**From the NMAAHC: “Stained glass from the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was donated by our colleagues Ann Jimerson (1963 Kids in Birmingham) and Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (SNCC veteran). Learn more here.”